It is important to understand and reject Hindutva
What is Hindutva? And why is it important to understand what it means?
The answer is simple, yet confusing.
The RSS has waited for more than 90 years for an opportunity to bring its message to New Delhi and finally its time has come.
It thought 1947 was the opportune time for the Hindu people to get their right back to their motherland and felt the Congress betrayed the Hindus by establishing a secular country.
This is their second chance. The Vajpayee government in 1998 does not count as he was a moderate leader and did not completely represent the views of the RSS.
The organisation that claims to speak for the ‘real people of this nation’ have finally got a strong leadership at the Centre and a real chance to execute what it believes this country should be like.
The BJP that is a believer in Hindutva (states it clearly on their website in the Vision section) is the political wing of the RSS that sees itself as a social organisation.
The stars have aligned for the RSS as the Congress is at its weakest since Independence and the BJP at its strongest. It’s the perfect time to strike on the Hindutva agenda except for one problem. The people of this country might not want its nationalism to be defined by religion.
The RSS has always believed that India should have been a Hindu nation and the Hindus should have been the rightful race that is identified with this nation - “like the English and the French.” In fact it sees the Congress as anti-Hindu because it did not push for this agenda.
The patience the RSS has displayed is extraordinary and the vehemence with which it will exert itself in the next few years is not to be underestimated. The RSS believes this holy land was desecrated by Christians and the Mughals (the invaders) over the last 1000 years and should be rightfully returned to its original state of Hindudom. It believes that this country will only regain its glory as a Hindu Rashtra when the practices of the Vedic age (the Golden Age of the Hindus) are brought back and the Hindu culture reigns supreme in this country.
It also believes that the Christians and Muslims will have to acknowledge their allegiance to the motherland and be grateful that they are being accepted into the Hindu fold. The text “Bunch of Thoughts” by MS Gowalkar, the defining text of the RSS, is quite hypocritical about religious acceptance. On the one hand it says Hindus are accepting and tolerant of other religions and on the other hand goes on to say, “It is a call and request to them (obviously the Muslims and Christians) to understand things properly and come back and identify themselves with their ancestral Hindu way of life in dress, customs, performing marriage ceremonies and funeral rites.”
So basically the Hindutva Hindus accept those other communities who give up their practices and accept the Hindu way of doing things.
I’m going to make a quick digression to the origin of Hindutva. The term was coined by Veer Savarkar in the book Hindutva: Who is a Hindu while he was in the dreaded prison in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in 1923.
This book was written 24 years before India became Independent from the British, so there was an urgent need to discover a national identity and national self-consciousness and the most obvious answer was to get Hindus to unite against the British.
In fact, many thinkers and philosophers of the time were confused about nationalism. Poet and author Rabindranath Tagore too grappled with the meaning of and differences between "nation" and "nationalism" that he wrote about explicitly in his fifth novel Gora. His protagonist went from being a blind follower of Hindu Brahmin practices of casteism and untouchability to realizing by the end of the novel that it is the universal brotherhood of mankind that is the highest form of patriotism. Tagore wrote Gora in 1910 and it seems that it is time to revisit his writing. After all he did write the National Anthem. But the times we live in are different from the times and needs of pre-independence.
Our need so much of the hour is not to figure out our national identity but to be patriotic Indians who contribute to the welfare of this country. And Hindutva is actually radically against that. It does not accept any such thing as "Indians" and believes the country has been wrongly called India. Also, there are several issues with the simplistic portrayal of a great Hindu nation that the Hindutva leaders and its followers believe in. The most obvious ones being of caste, absolute lack of women’s rights, unscientific practices and cultural moral policing.
All this anyone can find with a little bit of reading into the texts that form the basis of the RSS and Hindutva. But what I see as most dangerous is the Hindu voice being hijacked by the Hindutva brigade. When one small section and this is what the Hindutva believers are, begins to the speak up for an entire religious community, it is likely that over time they will lay claim over and be perceived as the defining voice of that religion.
I for one don’t perceive my national identity as being Hindu but as Indian. And I am not ready to accept that I am a lesser Hindu because of that. And I also don’t think because I am Hindu I have a larger claim over this land than my Muslim and Christian Indians. My religion is a small part of my overall identity that consists of what I do and how I act. This might seem a bit obvious and stupid to state, but when nationalism, identity and religion get confused and people begin to look at the people of a country through the prism of religion, nothing can be taken for granted.